Measuring Snapshots from NOVA

With NOVA’s onboard camera you’re able to save snapshots of your prints that you can view in the gallery, but also save to your computer. One of the main uses for these pictures is to measure your print's trace widths and spacing. NOVA doesn’t have the ability to natively do these measurements within the software, but you can use these pictures along with the listed µm/px ratio to do measurement in third party software, like ImageJ.

Saving Images on NOVA

To open up the camera feed on NOVA, select the camera icon from the bottom left corner of the software:

Once the camera feed is open, you can use the arrow keys to navigate around your print. Then when you have the area you want to capture in frame click the Save a Snapshot button to take a picture.

If your print isn't perfectly in focus, you can press the auto focus option to ensure your print is in focus before taking a snapshot.

The snapshot is saved to your gallery which you can navigate to it by selecting the Gallery tab next to the camera tab. Select the image you would like to look at from your gallery. You’ll notice the µm/px ratio is saved into the bottom left corner of the picture. If you’d like to save it, right click on the image and select the option to Save image as. Then follow the prompts to save it on your computer.

Measuring in ImageJ

ImageJ is an open source image processing and analysis tool that allows you to do a variety of powerful measurements with your images. You can download and install ImageJ here: https://imagej.net/ij/

ImageJ also has the option to run it in a browser if you prefer to not install it on your computer.

Once you have ImageJ installed (or running in your browser) you can open your snapshot from NOVA that you saved to your computer by selecting File > Open from the main menu.

Before measuring you’ll need to update the scale using the µm/px ratio in the snapshot. To do this, in the main menu select Analyze > Setscale. In the set Scale options window you’ll want to add a couple of key pieces of information so that your measurements are accurate.

• Set the distance in pixels to 1

• Set the known distance to your µm/px ratio, in this example it’s 21.68

• Leave the pixel aspect ratio as 1.0

• Update the unit of length to µm

• Click OK to apply the scale.

From there, you can start measuring your image. To do so you can select one of the tools, like the Straight Line tool, and draw where you would like to measure on your image. After completing the drawing in the main menu select Analyze > Measure (Ctrl + M) to display the measurement of the drawn shape.